If you’re planning a cleaning routine for the near future, you might be faced with a series of tough questions. The first one might be: Where to clean first? The other one is: When should I start?
Whether your home is compact or big and open, you can’t be everywhere at once so you’re going to need to decide on an area to start with.
On the other hand, if your house needs some serious cleaning and you haven’t found the perfect occasion, that’s understandable. You may be so busy with work and/or school that you will hardly make any time for cleaning. Although it might be a daunting task to keep a tidy and clean home, if you fit it in your schedule, you’ll increase your chances by a mile.
Let’s go through some ideas to help you organize a time and a place for cleaning your home.
When Should You Start Cleaning Your Home?
Your day has 24 hours just like everyone else. However, your time availability can change in a snap. Work emergencies, family emergencies, traffic. There are dozens of situations that would make your cleaning time need to wait for another day.
Everyone has a different timetable for their day, so if you work from home the way you manage time will be different from someone working onsite.
This also depends on how much you want to tackle in a single cleaning session: it might last anywhere from 15 minutes to 4 hours, that’s up to your goals and your energy.
If you are working from home and your schedule is not rigid, then maybe cleaning at around noon can be helpful for disconnecting from work and release some tension and stress.
On the other hand, if you’re working onsite, you might consider cleaning first thing in the morning, even before taking a shower: you’ll get rid of the hardest task before even leaving for work and you can rest during the evening.
This is pretty much the same principle people use for going to the gym at 5 a.m. Does this mean you need to wake up at 5 am to clean your kitchen? Of course not! Just try waking up half an hour early for starters.
Your area will probably impact your early cleaning routine. For example, full sunrise in Dallas can be anything between 6:20 and 7:30 am along the year, so if you want to finish before sunrise keep that in mind.
Finally, a strategy that could work for both scenarios would be to clean right before sleep time. This will help you release all the stress you’ve been carrying out since early in the morning. Plus, your mind gets a chance to disconnect from your computer or smartphone before going to bed.
Again, they both depend on your working hours.
Where Should You Start Cleaning Your Home?
Another tough question. Something that can be helpful is dividing your areas by the amount of work you think they will demand. A good approach is to start by the biggest area or the one you’re the least excited about. This will encourage you to keep going since the hardest room is already done.
For example, your kitchen and your bathroom(s) are usually tough areas because they are constantly exposed to grease, fat, food scraps, and other sticky elements such as soap and dirt.
Plus, being humid spaces with sometimes low-to-no ventilation and illumination, they become the perfect spot for mold and bacteria to grow. This will make them probably the most time-consuming spaces to clean.
If your home has multiple stories, start from the top and work your way to the bottom. This same advice can be applied to surfaces: wipe and clean the highest surfaces (cabinets, counters, bookshelves) because dust will fall and then you’ll be able to pick it up when you sweep your floors.
Conclusion
If you keep waiting for the perfect scenario, you’ll take forever. Start small both in the area you’re cleaning and the time you’re investing in it. Before realizing it, you’ll incorporate cleaning as a daily habit.
And if cleaning daily doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean that it’s the only possible solution! Many people prefer cleaning once a week or even once or twice per month. And if you don’t find the time, that’s okay too! Just hire a cleaning service and let them deal with it.